Thursday, March 20, 2014

Cancer and oral contraceptives: Searcher

After doing the readings and discussing in class how oral contraceptives can increase chances in cancer, especially in younger individuals I decided to look more into this. I found a article on the National Cancer Institute website about oral contraceptives and cancer correlations. It says that those whomever takes oral contraceptives does have an increase in the chances of breast cancer, however after 10 years of no longer taking the pill your likelihood of cancer goes back to normal (as if you never took birth control). This is really interesting to me because taking a pill that could potentially cause you to get cancer was very unappealing to me, but knowing that after you are off the pill for a number of years then everything goes back to normal, it doesn’t seem that bad. The information on this credible site is interesting to read because it also goes on to discuss what else could happen by taking oral contraceptives, but it is interesting to see how the side effects can be reversed to back to a time before taking the contraceptives. It says regardless of your family or medical history, if you had no chance of cancer before taking the pill, although your chances increase, after 10 years it’ll be back to normal. This is very important to mention, because telling people that if you take oral contraceptives at a young age can give you cancer is pretty scary, but if you also tell them after 10 years of being off the pill everything goes back to normal I think they wouldn’t be as nervous.